#could python talk? idk. i'm allowing it

[skysometric]

you went on a big asking spree asking about everyone's favorite games, but I'm curious... did you have a favorite album, TV show, or movie this year?

an EXCELLENT question! but my answers my be a little disappointing, because...

Favorite Movie of 2023

i don't... really watch movies? they don't capture my interest or investment like games do. this isn't for lack of trying over the years, i've been exposed to many different genres; i just don't click with the format, i guess. i think of them like the average boomer thinks of games – they're cute little distractions and not much else.

there's definitely a few movies that i like and stand out as formative memories, i just don't go out of my way to watch more. even before the pandemic i would only ever go to the theaters like once a year, and for most of the pandemic i can't say i watched anything even digitally.

...but that did change this year! my partner and i watched both Sonic movies and the Mario movie at home, and of the three i can safely say i enjoyed Sonic 2 the most! i like what it was trying to do with its two stories intertwined, and it gave Sonic and friends a lot of time to shine both in action and characterization. plus the finale was super cool~

i do have a handful of films i want to watch one day... but it's kind of a "whenever i feel like it" basis. the ghibli films are high on the list, as are the monty python films and the truman show. maybe i could revisit ferris bueller's day off now that i'm an adult...?

Favorite TV Show of 2023

...i also don't really watch tv?? am i boring???

i mean, historically, i've gotten more into tv than movies. i like the long continuous plot threads, i like getting to know characters in detail, i like slice of life and comedy and cartoons. i have fond memories of watching sonic x, spongebob, survivor, and mythbusters growing up!

but like, as an adult i've never seen the office, or steven universe, or adventure time... and i'm in no rush to, they're just not really priority for me. i can't even think of other shows i might want to watch. idk!

i tried to watch some anime at one point but that didn't really do me either? i guess i had some fun watching squid girl a few years back... i think i just get understimulated by just watching things, vs playing them.

confusingly, you know what i do get into? livestreams and let's plays. so my weird, cop-out answer of "favorite series" is that i've been really enjoying Chuggaaconroy's let's play of pokemon bw2. his let's plays have gotten me caught up with a series that i wasn't "allowed" to play as a kid... i guess that's part of why watching someone play a game isn't as understimulating to me?

Favorite Album of 2023

you can probably guess where this is going – i don't really listen to music that plays on the radio or gets recommended by spotify. i have good reason for this one though: music with lyrics is overstimulating to me in specific circumstances, like when i'm working (always) or driving (the only time i'd use the radio).

but wait, movies are understimulating, even though there's talking... and music with lyrics is overstimulating, even though there's nothing to watch... argh! i don't even understand myself!!

either way i usually put on video game music, because that helps me focus at work, and (usually) doesn't have lyrics in it. i'm aware there's plenty of great instrumental music outside of just games, but games already have so much variety and quality to their osts – i've rarely ever had to seek out more! my music collection is already big enough!

my favorite album to listen to this year has been the music that plays in the cyberspace stages of Sonic Frontiers. the full game's ost is MASSIVE and incredibly diverse in styles, but the hardcore EDM of the cyberspace stages is extremely my style. and the remixes they added in the dlc are some of the best ones! been listening to the full playlist multiple times a week all year to power through some rough work days, and it still hasn't gotten old 💖

#2023 year in review #asks #inbox #writing #notquiteapex

[sunkissed-mogai]

sorry I didn't respond yesterday love, I fell asleep and had things and just. Mm. /Neg. | Hamsters are so cool! I think Indi has a hamster to if i remember right I think his name is Sammy? Idk. Oh that's so cool!!!! I never thought of making a themed cage!!! Plus graveyard is such a cool theme!!! Woah !! Spooky AND fancy!!! Ghosts >> | I think it may be fun! We're all really exited, I've been trying to convince one of my friends (well call her > she/her) that she doesn't have to buy me anything, but > keeps insisting so i tild her that she can't buy ne anything over $5! And my other friend (well call him ^, all pronouns) is just really exited to go! It told > that she could get them auntie annes which does have really good pretzels!!! I'm super duper duper excited! Although I think I have to bring my own money even though my 18 (maybe 17 at the time) old brother got given money to go to the mall with his then girlfriend, but eh. I get to go and that's what's important! I'm gonna be doing like. Writing and studying And cleaning and stuff before and after the trip still j think. | I like 5 below! It's not a clothes store, but it's cheap and I'm cheap so it works out! | Wowowowowo<- me repeating wow a bunch of times for no reason | I have school today but my brother does not bc he doesn't have to take his exams. I dotn want to go to school, but alas. I must. We don't get out until June 15th in my county, but the one like. Right next to us gets out June 3rd-⭐

that's okay, no worries. you feeling a bit better now?? <3

oh i didn't know that!! that's so cool if she does, i love hamsters :] i personally would like a rat. and a ball python. not in the same enclosure for obvious reasons

ghosts!! yes!! we have a few ghost headmates and they are so cool

aww, that seems like what ainsley did!! (for literally everyone else that doesn't understand this, my friend ainsley took me out to starbucks, i bought my drink, but then she insisted on buying me this beautiful enamel pin for my bag) and yeah when someone's hellbent on buying you stuff there is Nothing you can say to make them not want to

auntie anne's is amazing!! i'm like never allowed to eat there but it's so good.

if we're talking not clothes stores, i love collage!! i'm just continuing to doxx myself here but it's in walking distance from my aunt's house and it's so awesome. they have pins, crafts, markers, journals, stickers, pride merch, stuffed animals, and just the most random silly chaotic stuff. i'm probably gonna go there and buy some cute stationery for if/when i find a pen pal in las vegas!

we get out on the 14th! i think ?_? gets out today :0 and my friend in illinois got out on may 20th!

#i once was poison ivy but now i'm your daisy; xenie gets asks! #⭐anon

[godsofhumanity]

Python: Listen here, pretty boy-

Apollo: Why is "pretty boy" considered an insult?

Python: ...it's-

Apollo: Call me pretty boy again.

Python:

Apollo: I want to be the ✨ prettiest boy ✨ you've ever seen 💖

#*narrator voice* and he was #could python talk? idk. i'm allowing it #funnier when u remember that apollo was a baby when he slayed python #apollo #python #greek gods #greek mythology #incorrect greek gods #incorrect greek mythology #incorrect mythology #mythology #s: tumblr #queuetzalcoatl

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[a-method-in-it]

Trans(masculine) former Potterhead here! I still own the books, were a gift, a hardcover set from my mom from years ago. I even made a parody of Im a Lumberjack and I'm OK from Monty Python as I'm a Hufflepuff and I'm OK and helped found a Dumbledore's Army club at my High School I loved HP so much, I was obsessed, but now I have so many mixed emotions about the franchise I don't really know what to do.

I cannot speak for trans women, but as a queer trans person, if I see someone reading the books or watching the movies or wearing merch its like. Ok. I know I might get along with this person, they like the same stuff I (used to) like....BUT do they know how the werewolf thing is about AIDS, implying gay people are out of control monsters, and how the only villain with werewolfism specifically targets minors, implying pedophilia is a trait inherent in gay people? Do they know that when a trans woman reads the books they worry they wont be "woman enough" to keep the stairs in the girls dorm from turning into a slide, because they know that the author specifically thinks they don't deserve to sleep in the girl's dorm because of their gentials? Do they understand that JK Rowling's opinions are there, insidiously rooting into young minds? Are they reading this critically? Or do they support what JK is saying? Do they know all of these things and not care about it, dismiss it out of hand?

Does this person want me dead?

It boils down to a Feeling of Unease. Is this person safe for me to be around? There is a Very Real Danger that the person in the Ravenclaw Shirt and Golden Snitch Earrings is going to call the police on a trans woman going to the bathroom, or beat her, or even kill her, because the author of their favorite series has convinced them trans women are men in dresses and that men in women's bathrooms are dangerous. That person could also be a nice genuine nerd, queer themselves, even potentially a friend, but now I am Suspicious of that person. I am suspicious of anyone who openly enjoys it (unless they are children, kids don't know better, or if they have a tattoo, idk how old that tat is). They want to read it at home and want a discussion on new themes and how to make it better/less gross? Fine by me.

But if someone is publicaly supportting her, staying extremely active in the fandom defending the books or movies or JK herself, having and wearing merch which could direct new people (probably kids! Who will get Obsessed! And don't know better!) into buying things from her and giving her money? After all that she's done? After she literally helped create legislation against being trans?? Not cool.

The series is just simply tainted for a lot of trans folk like me. I still hold it dear foe what it did for me as a child, and I know if I read the series again I would still love it, but I would also HATE myself for enjoying it, knowing that the person who wrote this, the bit of her soul which she has given me, wants me dead. Wants my friends dead.

So I'm not really saying if you support HP publicaly people will see you as a TERF but I am also absolutely saying that people will see you as a TERF if you publicaly support the HP franchise. Death of the author is well and good when the author is dead and/or their estate doesn't get any money for new books or merch purchased, but she is alive and actively trying to kill trans folks, so literally anything that could be seen as support of her, or get others to support her even accidentally, can make trans folk uncomfortable and feel unsafe.

Hope this helped? I know I'm not the original asker, this is just my two cents.

Hi there! Thank you for posting this lengthy and very thoughtful response (and I hope you don’t mind my answering publicly -- if so, let me know and I’ll delete). There is one (admittedly very long) thing I’d like to say in response, but if you’re not looking for that, just know that I really value hearing your perspective and you can feel free to skip all of this and carry on your way. 

---

You say that you would probably enjoy the books if you reread them, but would hate yourself for doing so -- and I just want to say that what you like does not make you a bad person or act as any valid basis for deserving hate, from yourself or anyone else. 

Like, for instance, I’m a person who cannot stand horror movies and I am genuinely confused that anyone would enjoy watching terrible things happen to people for 90+ minutes. But I would never say that people who like horror movies are bad people just because they do enjoy that. The same goes for violent video games -- I don’t like them, but I don’t think the people who do are bad.

Because what media you personally enjoy has really no bearing on whether you are a good person. Being a good person is about how you treat others, whether you are kind, whether you are patient, whether you are understanding, whether you help people when you can and show up for the people in your life when they need you. It has nothing to do with whether you like a particular book or movie or videogame. 

So if you do want to reread those books because you think they would bring you joy, I hope that you do. 

Long before she became a TERF -- (and for the record, I don’t think that she was actively and consciously transphobic at the time when she was writing the books, for the simple reason that most of the people who are TERFs today weren’t at that point) -- I had already gotten used to tuning out Rowling and her fondness for Word of God pronouncements. 

Like, Dumbledore being gay actually fit into the canon very well, but others? They just felt tired and not thought-out and her whole short history of American magic was incredibly lazy. The werewolfism=AIDS thing was offensive in very real ways--and also it should be noted just does not make sense as a metaphor. Not just because AIDS will kill you and being a werewolf will not and there’s no way to bridge that fundamental disconnect -- but also because the way people talk about being a werewolf in the damn books doesn’t resemble at all the way people talk about AIDS patients in real life. Which makes me think she didn’t actually mean for it to be a metaphor when she wrote it and then years later threw it out there because it sounded good to her in the moment because she hadn’t thought it through.

By the time we got to wizards shitting on the floor because she very clearly forgot that she had already had chamber pots referenced in the text, I was long-since tapped out. 

Which is all just to say that it is beyond fair for you to use being a fan of Harry Potter as a data point in gauging your safety as a trans person -- but if we’re talking just about you enjoying the books?

Well, in that case, fuck Rowling and her weird post-canon comments that half the time don’t even make sense. If she wanted trans girls to not be allowed up the stairs to the girls’ dormitory, she should have put it in the damn text. As far as I’m concerned, trans girls and trans boys are allowed up whichever staircase matches their sense of themselves (and, I like to think, nonbinary kids get the run of the whole tower). 

In fact, as far as I’m concerned, she lost the right to have me care what she says about the Harry Potter universe when all of her comments started being unbearably lazy, asinine, and/or nonsensical. If she’d been half this uninspired and careless when writing the actual books, I would have stopped reading them. 

This has been a very long reply on that single point, but I want to end by saying that the point is, even if I accepted the premise that liking the Harry Potter books is in and of itself wrong -- and I hope I’ve made something of a case that it’s not -- it still shouldn’t be something you hate yourself over. Short of actually murdering people, I’m not sure there’s anything that’s grounds to outright hate yourself, honestly, but liking a book is definitely not on the list. 

Either way, you seem like a lovely person, one who is very thoughtful and has been very patient and generous with your time in writing all of that out. I hope that you find ways to also be a little more patient and generous with yourself -- about Harry Potter or any other topic -- because you deserve that and you do not deserve to be hated by anyone, least of all yourself. And I also hope you have a good rest of your night. 

#method speaks #jk rowling discourse #but this my friends #i think #is the end of it for me for a while #she sucks #on multiple levels #the transphobia being the worst #and then just going right on down the list #it confuses me #that the woman who wrote Prisoner of Azkaban #became this #but life is strange #and here we are #theflowerpunknerd